Top 76 Gavin De Becker Quotes
#1. The institutions of psychiatry, law enforcement, and goverment have proved that no matter what our resources, you cannot reliable control the conduct of CRAZY PEOPLE. It is not fair, but it is so
Gavin De Becker
#3. Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait.
Gavin De Becker
#4. Intuition is always right in at least two important ways;
It is always in response to something.
it always has your best interest at heart
Gavin De Becker
#5. No is a word that must never be negotiated, because the person who chooses not to hear it is trying to control you.
Gavin De Becker
#7. A person (or an animal) who feels there are no alternatives will fight even when violence isn't justified, even when the consequences are perceived as unfavorable, and even when the ability to prevail is low.
Gavin De Becker
#8. Throughout history, fairly arbitrary lines drawn on maps have determined who prospers and who needs, who eats and who starves, who attacks and who is attacked, who lives long and who dies young. Oh, we have been slaves to those lines for so long ...
Gavin De Becker
#9. Every human behavior can be explained by what precedes it, but that does not excuse it,
Gavin De Becker
#10. Rock climbers and long-distance ocean swimmers will tell you it isn't the mountain or the water that kills - it is panic
Gavin De Becker
#11. An unhappy child not getting comfort or support at home will look for it somewhere else. Next
Gavin De Becker
#12. Most men fear getting laughed at or humiliated by a romantic prospect while most women fear rape and death.
Gavin De Becker
#13. In fact, if perceived as a rude woman, you are far less attractive a target than a polite one.
Gavin De Becker
#14. Perhaps the most admirable reason to seek rapport would be to put someone at ease, but if that is a stranger's entire intent, a far simpler way is to just leave the woman alone. Charm
Gavin De Becker
#15. Your suspicion alone is more than enough justification for preventing time alone with your child. You
Gavin De Becker
#17. violence is committed by people who look and act like people,
Gavin De Becker
#18. I am capable of what every other human is capable of. This is one of the great lessons of war and life.
Gavin De Becker
#19. I encourage women to ask other women for help when they need it, and it's likewise safer to accept an offer from a woman than from a man. (Unfortunately, women rarely make such offers to other women, and I wish more would.) I
Gavin De Becker
#20. a good exercise when worrying is to ask yourself, What am I choosing not to see right now? Worry may well be distracting you from something important. For
Gavin De Becker
#21. A woman is expected, first and foremost, to respond to every communication from a man.
Gavin De Becker
#22. There is no mystery of human behavior that cannot be solved inside your head or your heart.
Gavin De Becker
#23. when a victim tells her story and people respond with You-should-have-this or You-should-never-have-that, they are often adding to the victimization.
Gavin De Becker
#24. So when we wonder why we are victims so often, the answer is clear: It is because we are so good at it.
Gavin De Becker
#25. Threats betray the speaker by proving that he has failed to influence events in any other way. Most often they represent desperation, not intention.
Gavin De Becker
#26. children died that same week at the hands of a parent, just like every week - and most of them were under 5 years old. Four million luckier children were physically abused last year,
Gavin De Becker
#28. Persistent, Mike thought. Mark of those who succeed. Indeed, it was the mark of something, but not success. It was refusing to hear "no," a clear signal of trouble in any context. Forty
Gavin De Becker
#29. You have the gift of a brilliant internal guardian that stands ready to warn you of hazards and guide you through risky situations.
Gavin De Becker
#30. If you tell someone ten times that you don't want to talk to him, you are talking to them - nine more times than you wanted to.
Gavin De Becker
#31. Learned that the time after a major incident offered a period of safety and the best rest,
Gavin De Becker
#32. we recognize all things by the existence of their opposite - day as distinguishable from night, failure from success, peace from war." We could add "safety from hazard." When
Gavin De Becker
#33. The hijacking of an American jet in Athens looms larger in our concern than the parent who kills a child, even though the one happens rarely, and the other happens daily.
Gavin De Becker
#34. Believing that others will react as we would is the single most dangerous myth of intervention.
Gavin De Becker
#35. I've heard many times that people would make a comment, 'This looks like a bomb,' and still open it. That's one for the psychologists to answer.
Gavin De Becker
#36. Seven key abilities human beings need to effectively manage life: the ability to motivate ourselves, to persist against frustration, to delay gratification, to regulate moods, to hope, to empathize, and to control impulse. Many
Gavin De Becker
#37. Most human predators, however, seek power, not food. To destroy or damage something is to take its power.
Gavin De Becker
#38. No matter how famous the victim, no matter how powerful the advocates, it simply isn't always possible to control the conduct of other people.
Gavin De Becker
#39. because my childhood became all about prediction, I learned to live in the future. I didn't feel things in the present because I wanted to be a moving target, gone to the future before any blow could really be felt.
Gavin De Becker
#40. Their lives are literally on the line in ways men just don't experience.
Gavin De Becker
#41. Avoid being in the presence of someone who might do you harm.
Gavin De Becker
#42. Many believe the process of creativity is one of assembling thoughts and concepts, but highly creative people will tell you that the idea, the song, the image, was in them, and their task was to get it out, a process of discovery, not design. This
Gavin De Becker
#43. Ginger is not distracted by the way things could be, used to be, or should be. She perceives only what is. Our reliance on the intuition of a dog is often a way to find permission to have an opinion we might otherwise be forced to call (God forbid) unsubstantiated.
Gavin De Becker
#44. building prisons is our number one social program for young men
Gavin De Becker
#45. Only human beings can look directly at something, have all the information they need to make an accurate prediction, perhaps even momentarily make the accurate prediction, and then say that it isn't so.
Gavin De Becker
#46. I have had a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.
Gavin De Becker
#47. People should learn to see and so avoid all danger. Just as a wise man keeps away from mad dogs, so one should not make friends with evil men." - Buddha
Gavin De Becker
#48. I encourage people to remember that "no" is a complete sentence.
Gavin De Becker
#49. You have more brain cells than there are grains of sand on your favorite beach, and you have cleverness, dexterity, and creativity - all of which powerfully combine when you are at risk - if you listen to your intuition
Gavin De Becker
#50. That's what happens when you're angry at people. You make them part of your life. - Garrison Keillor In
Gavin De Becker
#51. Sexual predators often start with nonsexual touch to desensitize their targets. It might be "accidental" touch, or hugs, pats, strokes, hair-brushing, holding. A
Gavin De Becker
#52. Those people we are willing to suspect are inherently less dangerous than those we refuse to suspect. We
Gavin De Becker
#53. A person who is seeking to feel justification for some action might move from "What you've done angers me" to "What you've done is wrong." Popular justifications include the moral high ground of righteous indignation and the more simple equation known by its biblical name: an eye for an eye.
Gavin De Becker
#54. Those men who are the most violent are not at all carried away by fury. In fact, their heart rates actually drop and they become physiologically calmer as they become more violent.
Gavin De Becker
#55. In America, a woman is killed by a spouse every two hours.
Gavin De Becker
#56. It is understandable that the perspectives of men and women on safety are so different
men and women live in different worlds ... at core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.
Gavin De Becker
#57. (if you never make a decision, you can't make a mistake). It
Gavin De Becker
#58. Usually, they have to attach a tentacle to someone else before detaching all the tentacles from their current object.
Gavin De Becker
#59. Does he do all this with evil design? No, it is part of his concept of how to retain love.
Gavin De Becker
#61. If we studied any other creature in nature and found the record of intra-species violence that human beings have, we would be repulsed by it. We'd view it as a great perversion of natural law - but we wouldn't deny it.
Gavin De Becker
#62. The unsolicited promise is one of the most reliable signals because it is nearly always of questionable motive.
Gavin De Becker
#63. Randomness and lack of warning are the attributes of human violence we fear most, but you now know that human violence is rarely random and rarely without warning.
Gavin De Becker
#64. Ernest Becker writes, "The urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it honest. For everyone to admit it would probably release such pent-up force as to be devastating to society." Well,
Gavin De Becker
#65. Safety is the preeminent concern of all creatures and it clearly justifies a seemingly abrupt and rejecting response from time to time.
Gavin De Becker
#66. I don't believe in such a thing as the criminal mind. Everyone's mind is criminal; we're all capable of criminal fantasies and thoughts.
Gavin De Becker
#67. As the most powerful people in history, we have climbed to the top of the world food chain, so to speak. Facing not one single enemy or predator who poses to us any danger of consequence, we've found the only prey left: ourselves.
Gavin De Becker
#68. Ordinary citizens can encounter violence at their jobs to the point that homicide is now the leading cause of death for women in the workplace.
Gavin De Becker
#69. If we are looking for some specific, expected danger, we are less likely to see the unexpected danger. I urge that she pay relaxed attention to her environment rather than paying rapt attention to her imagination.
Gavin De Becker
#70. A Federal research project selected 1,600 children who had been abused or neglected and followed them for nearly twenty years.
Gavin De Becker
#71. You'll be thinking of me. You may not be thinking good thoughts, but you'll be thinking of me.
Gavin De Becker
#72. There's a lesson in real-life stalking cases that young women can benefit from learning: persistence only proves persistence - it does not prove love. The fact that a romantic pursuer is relentless doesn't mean you are special - it means he is troubled.
Gavin De Becker
#73. The solution to violence in America is the acceptance of reality
Gavin De Becker
#74. People who refuse to let go often make small requests that appear reasonable, like Tommy's letter of reference, though the real purpose of such requests is to cement attachment or gain new reasons for contact.
Gavin De Becker
#75. I've successfully lobbied and testified for stalking laws in several states, but I would trade them all for a high school class that would teach young men how to hear "no," and teach young women that it's all right to explicitly reject.
Gavin De Becker
#76. And why do we worship hindsight (as in the news media's constant rehash of the day, the week, the year) and yet distrust foresight, which actually might make a difference in our lives?
Gavin De Becker
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